The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [56]
Neal turned around to look behind him and saw Ben Chin standing there. He didn’t take the time to bitch him out, but started running after Li and Pendleton, who were disappearing around a sharp curve beneath a huge banyan tree. No problem, Neal thought, he could catch them easily. He hit his stride quickly and was gaining on them when he reached the curve. He could hear Ben Chin pounding along behind him.
Li Lan hadn’t come alone. There were three of them, and they stepped between Neal and his quarry. They were ten feet in front of him and they looked like they all had the same favorite movie—each wore a white T-shirt, jeans, and a black leather jacket, and each was carrying a chopper, a Chinese hybrid between a carving knife and a cleaver. Neal could just see Lan and Pendleton fading into the darkness behind their human screen. He looked at the Leather Boy in the middle: a large, solid youth who stood there shaking his head. Neal stopped cold and stood as still as he could. He raised his hands in the universal gesture of surrender and began to back up gently.
“Okay … okay … you win,” he said. “I’ll just go back the way I came.” I’ll go all the way back to Yorkshire, if you want. Walking. Backwards.
He heard movement in the bushes above him. Maybe it was Ben Chin. Maybe he had broken their deal and hidden his whole vicious crew in the woods. Please…. Neal slowly turned his head to see three more armed men come down through the woods to block the path behind him. Wrong crew.
Oh shit, oh dear. Okay, Ben Chin, where are you? Nowhere to be seen. You’re pretty tough with old ladies, Ben, but when it comes to your peer group …
Neal risked a glance to his right. Maybe, just maybe he could make it to the low stone wall and jump over the edge. The problem was that he didn’t know what was over the edge, a nice soft fir tree or a fifty-foot precipice culminating on a rock.
Leather Boy One raised his chopper and made a crisscross motion in front of his chest. Neal heard the fighters behind him close in another couple of feet. Then the line in front of him did the same thing.
The fifty-foot-drop option didn’t seem so bad. Being smashed on a rock seemed preferable to being chopped to pieces. His Eighteenth Century Lit friends would call that a Hobson’s choice.
Leather Boy One raised his chopper.
The Doorman dropped from the limb of the banyan tree right on top of Leather Boy One. They crashed to the ground and the Doorman reached out and grabbed the ankle of another one of the gang and pulled his feet out from under him. The Doorman was no match for Leather Boy One but held him down long enough to look up at Neal and gesture with his eyes to jump over the tangled mass—he had opened the door.
Neal heard a mass of running footsteps from behind and then in front, and Chin’s crew filled the path in both directions. One of them sliced the third Leather Boy across the arm with a chopper while the other reached out and pulled Neal over the top of the Doorman and Leather Boy One, who were still grappling on the ground. Then he pushed Neal along the path.
“Run!” he yelled.
Leather Boy One got a leg behind the Doorman’s ankle and flipped him over. He brought his chopper down on the back of the Doorman’s knee. The Doorman screamed in pain and grabbed Leather Boy One’s ankles and held on. The chopper came down again, on the other knee.
Chin’s assistant was pushing Neal away from the scene.
“Go, go, go!” he yelled.
“We have to help him!”
“He’s dead!”
Neal looked behind him and saw that both gangs were fighting. Screams of rage and the clang of metal on metal hit his ears, and the flashes of steel under the streetlamps dazzled his eyes. He felt more arms pulling on him now, moving him away from the fight, away from where the Doorman lay bleeding and whimpering, away from the danger. He could run now and make it, and Chin’s assistant and the others would protect his back. He felt the cool, clean air of safety.
He tore himself away from the arms and headed back toward the Doorman, who lay in the middle of the fight.